For lawyers only

January 28, 2005

The Legal Underground Word of the Week: Champerty

Today's Legal Underground Word of the Week, Champerty, is read by Kevin Heller, the Tech Law Advisor. You can hear the production as an MP3 or as a podcast by subscribing to this RSS feed with iPodder or a similar product. To learn more about Kevin, one of my best blogging-lawyer friends, see his recent biographical post, "900 Days and Counting."

The music was assembled with Acid Pro 3.0. If you'd like to participate in my audio-blogging word-of-the-week project, simply choose a suitable word from Black's Law Dictionary, record yourself reading it, and then send it to me in mp3 or wav format. I'll set it to music for all the world to hear--at no charge!

By the way, the Legal Underground's assorted audio posts are being collected in a directory at Podcast.net.

I also did a lot of research on champerty, back when I was involved in trying to set up a sort of bank that would fund other lawyers' litigation. For reasons that would make a very good story, and which perhaps I'll tell someday (having to do with stock market problems in the US, but especially in Russia), it didn't get off the ground. Now, however, there are seemingly a hundred competitors.

I bet Professor Brickman was using your research for a very different purpose.

Dear anonymous: Your comment counted as bullshit comment spam, which is why I added the portion in brackets, and now I'm going to have to put you on double-secret probation. Had you been not been such a nitwit, you could have covered your tracks by making something up about how good Kevin Heller sounded reading the definition of "champerty." Then it would have looked like a real comment. But no--you just left a web address. Did you think that we would give a shit about you and your weblog? Well, we don't.

Well, maybe we do. Since I'm such a nice guy, I added a link to your site on my blogroll (it looked like a moderately interesting law-student weblog), just in case you had good intentions and simply committed an innocent blogging faux pas. But don't think I'm not going to be watching you! I also advise you to get a blogroll on your weblog and link permanently to both me and Kevin Heller (and Denise Howell too, since she linked to this post), in order to atone for your sins.

In the future when you want to publicize one of your weblogs, you can simply send me an e-mail. That's what other people do.